Bad News: Ninjas Will Soon Be Extinct

Can I confess something? If I read another “why Romney lost” piece I might scream. Romney lost for many reasons, not any single reason. Barack Obama is, like Bill Clinton, an unusually good liar. That helps in politics. It also helps when the media actively lies on your behalf while covering for your lies and casting everything your opponent says as either cruel or a lie. The media never even acknowledge his “Let me be clear” tell that signals he’s about to tell a very clear lie.

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Mitt Romney was an unusually bad truth teller who managed not to connect with enough voters and who did not spend any time defining his opponent or his policies with the dreaded L-word: “liberal.” He should have defined Obama as a liberal from day one and seared that word into the public’s minds. Romney lost because the ethic of hard work is lost on a vast swath of the voting populace. Romney lost because Obama exploited cultural and information gaps to fool enough people into believing that electing Mitt Romney would bring an end to contraception. Seriously, some idiots actually believed that. Romney lost because he brought no single state into play either with his presence on the ticket or, as it turned out, with his selection of running mate. Could he have won with Rubio on the ticket? Probably. But he didn’t pick Rubio.

Obama won because some people see him as inspiring, while his ground game combined real GOTV with cheating and outright vote buying. His campaign chiefs knew he was going to lose much of his 2008 vote, so they planned to do without it. What was the margin of Obama’s victory in Ohio? A little over 100,000 votes. How many Obama phones are there in Ohio? About a million. Do the math. Am I saying that Obama exploited the misery he helped create to increase dependence and then presented himself as the benefactor to enough Americans to hand him re-election? As a matter of fact, I am. I am suggesting that he found a way to bring out or buy enough votes here and there, by whatever means he had to resort, to win. He didn’t use any single tactic so much as he flooded the zone with a whole bunch of tactics for which a gentleman such as Mitt Romney was unprepared. Romney thought he was fighting a civilized duel, when he was facing a shadow war the whole time.

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So, everyone who is saying that this or that single cause is why Obama won, is wrong. So are the remedies they’re all coming up with. Some are incoherent. Grover Norquist wants open borders and no tax hikes. In no reality are those policies compatible. The way things are going, he’ll get the open border, and he’ll get tax hikes to the sky. Both policies will lead inevitably to more tax hikes.

So I’m posting about ninjas. Businessman Jinich Kawakami and 80-year-old Masaaki Hatsumi are the last known real ninjas on earth. They both lead ninja dojos in Japan that date back to the days of the shogun. Both have decided that once they’re gone, there will be no ninjas to follow them.

Both Kawakami and Hatsumi are united on one point. Neither will appoint anyone to take over as the next ninja grandmaster.

“In the age of civil wars or during the Edo period, ninjas’ abilities to spy and kill, or mix medicine may have been useful,” Kawakami says.

“But we now have guns, the internet and much better medicines, so the art of ninjutsu has no place in the modern age.”

As a result, he has decided not to take a protege. He simply teaches ninja history part-time at Mie University.

Despite having so many pupils, Mr Hatsumi, too, has decided not to select an heir.

“My students will continue to practice some of the techniques that were used by ninjas, but [a person] must be destined to succeed the clan.” There is no such person, he says.

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Sad.

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